“I’m so sorry, dude,” Luke replied. “I had no idea.”
“What am I supposed to do now?” David asked.
“Try to fend him off with that fork thing,” Luke suggested. “Keep his teeth and claws away from you.”
“Gee, that’s a big help,” David mumbled. “I’m gonna die here.”
“Look at it this way,” said Luke, who was always trying to look on the bright side. “You have a weapon, and he doesn’t. So you have an advantage.”
“Yeah, but he has an advantage too,” David replied. “He’s a tiger!”
The walls around the arena were seven feet high. David turned around and tried to climb the gate.
“Let me back in!” he shouted through the bars. “Please! I’ll do anything!”
“Get down, slave!” shouted the guards, poking their spears through the holes in the gate.
David fell back down to the dirt. The crowd roared with laughter.
Interestingly, when he was in third grade, David’s class had done a unit about endangered species. And quite coincidentally, David’s topic for his report had been tigers. He tried to remember what he had written. . . .
Tigers: Friend or Foe?
By David Williams, grade 3
I love animals, and especially tigers, because tigers are cool! They are striped land animals and they are the largest of all the cat species. A tiger can weigh more than eight hundred pounds. Wow, that’s heavy. I wouldn’t want one of them to sit on me! They can run really fast, too, like thirty or forty miles an hour. And they can jump more than thirty feet. Tigers also live a long time. More than twenty-five years! They are the national animal of Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, and South Korea.
I wouldn’t want to get into a fight with a tiger. They are carnivores. That means they eat meat. Tigers don’t usually eat humans, but sometimes they do. In fact, tigers cause more human deaths than any other wild mammal. When tigers attack a human or another animal, they usually go for the throat. They will grab onto the neck of their prey. Then they break the spinal cord. Then they pierce the windpipe. Then they sever the jugular vein. The prey dies from strangulation.
“Oh, shoot!” David shouted again.
The tiger looked a little confused after it entered the arena. It was startled by the sound of the crowd. It had grown up in the jungle and spent the last few weeks locked in a small cage. This was a new environment for it.
David stood in one place like a statue, out of fear and common sense. He was trying to make himself invisible. Maybe the tiger wouldn’t notice him and just leave him alone.
The tiger, more than anything else, was hungry. It hadn’t been fed in a few days. This was on purpose. The animals that were pitted against gladiators needed a little extra motivation to fight, so they were kept hungry. Human beings were not part of their regular diet.
The tiger stalked around slowly, looking left and right, sniffing the ground for something to eat. Unfortunately, the only edible thing in the arena was David.
“Hilarius! Hilarius! Hilarius!”
“Fight, slave!” a man shouted at David. “Or are you a coward?”
Somebody threw a rock, and it landed in the middle of the arena. The tiger saw it hit the ground out the corner of its eye and looked up. That’s when it noticed David, standing stiffly about fifty yards away. Slowly and cautiously, the tiger started moving along the wall in David’s direction.
“I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die,” David mumbled to himself.
He realized he wasn’t going to win this battle by becoming invisible. He started walking backward along the wall. But he would have to come up with another strategy. The tiger was moving faster than he was, and getting closer.
Stay calm, David thought. It’s just a big cat, right? I used to have a cat, but we had to give it away because my mom was allergic to it. I love cats. Cats are cute and cuddly—
That’s when the tiger opened its mouth and let out a roar. They could hear it echo up in the top level of the amphitheater.
“Oh, shoot!” David shouted again.
The crowd gasped.
The tiger charged toward David.
He dropped the trident and the net and ran for his life.
The tiger was gaining ground on him.
Well, this is surely where the story of the Flashback Four ends, right? David is going to get eaten by the tiger while Luke, Isabel, and Julia will be stuck in Pompeii and have their all-too-brief lives ended when the volcano erupts and destroys everything in sight.
What a sad and tragic ending, especially in a book for children. Your innocent eyes and ears probably wouldn’t be able to handle such a depressing and violent ending like that. Children’s books are supposed to end happily, with the main characters looking ahead to their bright future and further adventures. Maybe the author—not me—is going to come up with some miraculous way to get the Flashback Four out of this predicament. But he’d better do it fast, because there are only 27 minutes left on the timer, and only a few more chapters left in this book.
From his years of playing basketball and baseball, David was in good shape. And he was fast, one of the fastest kids in his school. He took off, hugging the wall as he ran around the perimeter of the oval arena. The tiger was right behind him. The crowd was loving it, screaming and laughing at the spectacle. To them, Hilarius was hilarious.
While tigers may be able to run forty miles per hour and the fastest human can only run about twenty-three miles per hour, this was not a particularly fast tiger. He was old, more than twenty years. That was why it was possible for the Romans to capture him in the first place.
David was able to stay about five steps in front of the tiger all the way around the arena. In the middle of their second lap, though, both
